


With Spirit Strongly Stirr'd

by RecessiveJean



Category: Enola Holmes Series - Nancy Springer
Genre: AU - Gaslamp Fantasy, Brother-Sister Relationships, Canon Divergence, Co-ordinated Rescue, F/F, Gen, Spirit Projection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:40:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21826852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: When Geoffrey proves a more formidable adversary than Enola and her dagger can handle, it falls to the spectral form of Cecily Alistair to supply and solicit all needful aid.
Relationships: Cecily Alistair/Enola Holmes
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	With Spirit Strongly Stirr'd

**Author's Note:**

  * For [azurish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurish/gifts).



> _What will not woman, gentle woman dare  
>  when strong affection stirs her spirit up?_  
> —Robert Southey

The figure which occupies the westernmost corner of the room is a singular one indeed. No shape could be more incongruous, and yet in a way its very incongruity makes it best-suited to its environment.

The chamber is the most public room of any person's private household: the parlour. This one is decorated in equal measure with self-conscious professionalism and a discernible lack of softening feminine touches. No modestly skirted lower limbs here; the furniture stands with shocking nudity on a handsome carpet of richly intricate and foreign workmanship. There are some of the customary protective magical fixtures, of course: patent wards on the window locks, and swags placed over doorways to protect against eavesdropping. They are minimally decorative in their working, though, which suggests no lady of the house had any hand in their fashioning.

The little lady—for a lady she is, though her costume would conceal this fact from all but the keenest onlooker—who rests in a corner chair does not avert her eyes with shocked embarrassment from these deficiencies, but rather studies them thoughtfully, looking away only when the door opens to admit a man of some height, stooped only by his obvious attention to her presence and his uncertainty over the social demands on him in this instance.

A lady to her very core, the small figure saves him the embarrassment of stepping wrong.

“My rescuer,” she says lightly, and smiles to show she is making a little joke.

“Hardly,” murmurs the man so named, committing a different social solecism in contradicting her. “It was my elder brother who brought you here, and even he declaims all right to that role. Which means that she who _might_ fairly claim the title is not, at present—” He casts about the room, as if pausing to verify the accuracy of his statement, “—present.”

But his gaze lingers a little overlong on the deepest-shadowed of corners. 

Fanciful, one might think him, for the room is so well lit that even without the burglary wards in place, the shadowed corners could still not possibly hope to contain all but the very smallest of personages. Young children, certainly, or at a very great stretch a slim youth of more than unusual talent for concealment, but it is sheerest folly, certainly, to fear the machinations of either such.

When he returns his gaze at last to the face of his guest, the host—he is none other than the famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, and she a temporary beneficiary of his hospitality at that most famous address, 221B Baker Street—makes a visible effort to marshal his wits and senses.

“You have assured me repeatedly of your well being, Lady Cecily. I fear I must risk your faith in my good manners if I press you again to confirm that you are in truth none the worse for your recent trial and that your misadventures have visited no lasting harm on your person. I am, you see, charged by your good mother to restore you healthfully to her care, and I do not wish to undertake this task until I am confident that I may do so without risking injury to you in effecting transit.”

Lady Cecily Alistair (and well may you wonder at so august a style affixed to so humble a figure, clad as the young lady is in the garments of an orphan, made all the more modest and respectable by their very dowdiness) only smiles beatifically at the man who is not, in fact, the hero of the hour, but who has nevertheless capably bent his talents to supporting her true rescuer in that effort.

“I see that scrupulous attention to my wants, needs and wellbeing promises to be a family trait.” 

Her voice is remarkable not only for its clarity, but also for its ability to carry well even when pitched at a low volume. But then, these are the skills that, like comportment, manners and domestic magical workings, are taught to all ladies of good birth and breeding. Had the sister of Sherlock Holmes been likewise appropriately instructed, Cecily Alistair might not perhaps have stood in such contrast to her as she seems to do now.

Indeed, Sherlock Holmes struggles in this moment to grasp the origin of his notion that the two girls are at all similar. It is difficult to imagine two creatures who could be less so. True, he had experienced relatively little contact with his sister Enola, separated as they were first by her eccentric country rearing and then of late by her unaccountable skittishness and refusal to be sent away to an appropriate finishing school, but the impression he has received of her to date has been distinctly one of great limb and lung and a profile considerably unbalanced in strong favour of the proboscis region, and thereby to the considerable detriment of that young lady's ever being able to claim the coveted Classical Profile.

Whereas here, in Lady Cecily, injured though she is in dignity to her true station by the adoption of these rough garments, and shorn and barbered though her dainty head had been by the heavy-handed desperation of Enola herself, is a person as unlike Enola as Sherlock had ever imagined could exist. She is in essence the very manner of young lady he and his brother Mycroft had trusted they would find when they first went in search of her: a gentlewoman in all respects, flattered by her own delicacy and correct attention to all social graces. In short, a person as unlike the Enola they had encountered as could ever be said to exist.

And yet . . .

He fixates on Lady Cecily now at great cost to the very social graces which are so in evidence in her person.

There is something vexingly familiar in her eyes. Some spark of merit and purpose which he has only just begun to acknowledge, in his own mind, might belong to a woman in her own right. Proof, in short, of intellect.

Of rebellion.

He regards her with renewed suspicion, his trained gaze amplified by correct application of rigorously honed magical gift. He scrutinises every fold of her drab little orphan's weeds, the dull gown of generous and sensible cut, the plain pinafore, the dark stockings and ungainly boots, all topped by the rumpled, if clean, mobcap which still shields the worst evidence of her haircut from plain view. He seeks in her any proof of intent to deceive; to flee.

That less likely-looking a flight risk than Lady Cecily has ever crossed his path does nothing to assure him of her constancy. Less than a year ago he was set back on his heels by the unexpected flight and determined disappearance of his own sister, and since that day she has confounded his every effort to fetch her home. Females, he has lately learned, contain unexpected depths.

(“And where do we keep them?” Enola's precise accents slice cleanly through his head, unbidden, unwelcome, yet not entirely unpleasant. “These hidden depths? Egad, brother, we are not oceans with fathoms unplumbed, nor yet dry wells on arid farmland. Hidden depths! What, do you imagine I wear these depths concealed beneath my petticoats? Or perhaps closer to the skin, laced within my—”

He hastily shuts the door on this vivid conjecture of his near relation. That the indelicacy is his mind's own creation makes it no more comfortable to imagine issuing from his gently-bred, if not altogether gently-reared, younger sister.)

Refocusing his attention on Lady Cecily, he is newly aware that she returns it. Her gaze probes his features with the ruthless scrutiny of one who not only sees, but _knows_. He has encountered the same depth of scrutiny in very few venues outside his profession, and for one wild moment he is tempted to accuse her of . . . what?

Detection? The very idea is so improper as to be impossible to voice aloud without causing her offence. There is also no trace of magic in her scrutiny, and she is surely no student of medicine. Which leaves—

“Tell me, my lady,” his gaze flits over her exposed fingertips consideringly, searching for any of the telltale signs that even her prolonged captivity could not have so easily erased, “are you by any chance an artist?”

His hit lands with such palpable violence on the girl that he immediately regrets his sally. She starts wildly and her eyes swell with shock beneath the woebegone sawridge fringe that peeps out from beneath the ruffle of her mobcap. She resembles nothing so strongly as a finely-bred horse about to kick over its traces, and he, with the instinct of a person attuned better to the fears and foibles of animals than his fellowman, goes down at once into a seat so as to render himself a less imposing figure.

“My lady, I have caused alarm. A careless habit of mine, this voicing of deduction. I had only perceived in you a certain quality—”

But Lady Cecily seems not to heed him at all. Instead she is gazing into the hearth, on which the fire leaps. She seems to see a different setting altogether when she murmurs,

“ _She_ saw me, too. Not even in the flesh: she divined me in my work, and named me in the spirit, so that I was recalled to my own mind and self.”

Her hands twist slightly in her lap.

“She rescued me. Twice.”

Sherlock hesitates to intrude on her reflection, lest he risk a complete undoing of her composure. But a moment later she regards him again, and there is no remnant of her recent shock. Only genteel certainty.

“Mr. Holmes, I hope you will trust my assurance that I am quite fit for travel. However, before we undertake the journey to effect the happy reunion with my mother, I must undertake to balance accounts. To that end I have, I fear, one more favour to beg of you. Will you indulge me in it?”

She arranges herself a trifle more correctly on the chair, as if to compensate for the indelicacy of what she says next.

“It involves, of necessity, a work of magic.”

~*~

What, precisely, my brother Sherlock thought when he saw me sail boldly into the home of Lord Rodney Whimbrel, armed so far as he knew with nothing sharper than my wit and nerve, has yet to be revealed to me. I think this is largely because his sensibilities in regard to my age and sex preclude him from giving full voice to his thoughts in that moment, and so out of delicacy of feeling for his finer nature I forebear even now to press him on it.

Yet I have little doubt he suffered a palpable shock at the time.

That I was in fact better equipped for my planned confrontation than I appeared to be would, of course, have been unknown to him, though given all he had learned of me in our encounters to date he would have done well to credit me with at least a little more sense than to embark on such hazards wholly unprepared. It is true that I have not been schooled in the gentler magics thought appropriate to my sex: no mirror-scrying, charm-embroidering, potion-dabbling for Enola Holmes. No, my mother let me run as wild as the prohibited herbs she cultivated at our country property and painted in abundance to decorate her walls.

Yet it is this very deficiency of feminine graces that enabled me to concentrate all of my previously untrained gifts on workings of my own design. I determined to train myself principally in the retrieval of lost objects and the development of my own insight into the Unseen. So far these gifts have permitted me to set up investigative practices to complement, if not compete with, my brother Sherlock, and the practice, refinement and application of certain illusion and concealment workings have in turn permitted me to frustrate all of my brothers’ most dedicated attempts to retrieve me.

Unfortunately I had not yet determined how to guard against accidental encounters, and such was our meeting that night.

Accidental, alarming, potentially catastrophic for both myself and the kidnapped landlady whose rescue was my primary goal? Yes, all of these descriptors could, without accusation of histrionics, be applied to my encounter with my brother. I kept my wits about me even so, and sailed directly up to the front door, shattering its gentle shimmer of protective overnight enchantments with a brisk, purposeful assault on the knocker.

What the sight of this imprudence did to my brother, I do not, as I say, know for sure. But I do like to imagine it caused him some passing thrill of alarm.

It would be no more than my due if my brothers were to acknowledge that I have done very well on my own, but they were as yet reluctant to come to this acknowledgement. At the time that I presented myself and entered the home of Lord Whimbrel, my brother Sherlock was still largely of the mind that I was a wayward and unknowing creature, who wanted fetching home to safety. So I indulge, instead, in the fantasy that within the heart of my brother at the sight of his younger sister so endangered, there might have stirred some flutter of misgiving: if not wholly fuelled by fraternal affection, then at least partially kindled thereby.

These, you see, are the little fancies with which I entertain myself: that my brothers do hold me in some semblance of warm regard, inasmuch as they are able, and that it is only the restriction of their station and the upbringing they suffered in the pursuit of it which prohibits them from making full expression of their feeling.

On the night that I entered Whimbrel Hall, bound and determined to rescue my landlady, I knew that I did so in full, horror-struck view of my brother. I did _not_ know that I also did so in full view of another. Insofar as I knew, only the butler who admitted me and the brother who watched him do it were witness to the scene, and I was not to discover my error for some time.

In the interim, all proceeded much as I had expected, even as I had hoped that it would. The butler permitted me to awe and aggrandize myself at him. No charm was required to secure his cooperation, nor was it likely that onesuch would work if I had tried. Most persons of any status usually take steps against the common sort of influences which may be worked by garden-variety enchantments on the will. Only the poorest of the poor and certain sheltered country rustics are likely to be caught unwarded against psychic influence—they, and sometimes especially delicate young noblewomen who are already under considerable spiritual strain.

Unbidden, a compelling image rose in my memory.

I envisaged in my mind’s eye the drawn, fixed features of my young lady as I had early known her, a delicate spectral phantasm held under the sway of a charlatan who exploited her good heart and obliging nature for his own unscrupulous ends. Her spirit’s divorce from its flesh had been hastened by cruelties inflicted prior to their meeting, but he had not scrupled to use her affliction against her. I had saved her from his influence, but I had not been able to save her from the influence of society on her father, and so I had next served as her rescuer from a more fleshly imperilment: a forced marriage, disagreeable to any young lady, was made a thousand times more unpleasant by the boorish nature of the cousin to whom they had purposed to see her wed.

I had spirited her away in my own fashion from that peril, but had not from that date encountered her in spirit or the flesh. I hoped that whatever her current trials might be, she was at very least as well-warded against further exploitation as the menial of Lord Rodney Whimbrel.

If, however, she were not, and further harm were to menace her . . .

A flicker of a shadow settled across the back of my mind at this unwelcome fancy. I banished it by hammering the heel of my hand with particular fervour against the sealing-wax of my summons, and passing it to the butler to carry to his master.

He would not know that he was more fortunate in his psychic protections than Lady Cecily Alistair, nor was he likely to care if I informed him. Instead I cradled the memory of her very close and dear, and quite correctly private. I hoped that whatever treatment her mother had taken her to pursue in Vienna had met with success, and she might even now be making her way back across the continent to share a city with me once more.

My summons to the billiard-room and the company of my unwilling host arrived before news of Lady Cecily, and with considerable regret I broke off my private reminiscences to answer my more immediate responsibility to Mrs. Tupper and her rescue from the clutches of the Whimbrel brothers.

That Geoffrey was present for the encounter rather disappointed my hopes of bringing the matter to a speedy resolution. The discovery that he had clearly devoted the bulk of his own magical studies to the enhancement and enforcement of his will on the company around him dealt a further blow to my schemes. Geoffrey was a man who desired to command the attention of any room, and had undertaken to ensure the room had little choice but to be commanded.

Lord Rodney Whimbrel, in contrast, was the sort of man who might disappoint the expectations of any parent. I could not, despite all my devotion to the supernatural heightening of my own perception, for the life of me work out what special talent he held and had nurtured from the schoolroom, as all well-bred young men are taught to do. Indeed he seemed wholly secondary to his younger brother in all respects save birth and entailed rank, and deferred to him most pathetically. I could almost sympathise with the younger scoundrel by the point he countered his elder brother with a contemptuous,

“Well, at least _one_ son of our father has some guts.”

With which coarse utterance, in a single moment, not giving even so much warning as a coiling snake might have done, he darted to seize me.

I am no stranger to assault, but I am as prey to the shock of the unexpected as any mortal. Were it not that the billiards table stood between us, he would have had me. But he needed to go around that obstacle, giving me just enough time to whip out my dagger and menace him with its stiletto-like eight-inch steel blade. I do not blush to say I enhanced its appearance with some force of my own secondary, illusory gift, and it must have looked quite menacing indeed in that moment, for he stopped dead and wavered at the sight.

“You are not to lay hands on me,” I told him softly between my teeth as he froze, staring, “for two reasons. This is one.” I cocked my uplifted dagger so that the gas-light shone more prettily upon its blade. “The other is that my brother has seen me enter this house, and is waiting near the gate to see me come out again.”

By my fickle luck, arguably either good or bad, this was true; Sherlock Holmes had come here, presumably by following the same reasoning as I had, although arriving at his conclusions a bit more quickly: the greybeard loitering in the street with his magics damped by smothering cloak and skilfully woven cloth of concealment was the great detective in disguise.

And, I realised rather to my own amazement, I did trust my older brother with my life, although not with my freedom.

“If I fail to appear within a reasonable time, he will take action, and I assure you, you will find him a most formidable adversary.”

Silence followed, and there we stood like a tableau, I with my back to the wall and my dagger raised, Geoffrey poised a mere two paces from me with sheerest evil in his eyes, and Lord Rodney on the other side of the billiards table—I did not of course chance a look at him, but I imagined he might be wringing his hands.

Alas, Geoffrey was a more formidable adversary himself than I had given him credit for.

A weighty and fearful talent leaped out at me, and as the magic worked his will upon my mind it came over me all at once how _heavy_ the dagger was, and how _dangerous_ and—a smooth, chiding voice slid easily through my mind—how _unsuitable_ an item it was for a young lady.

“Oh my goodness, how foolish of me,” I sighed, and quite without knowing my own mind I set it gently aside on the billiard-table.

Almost as soon as it had left my hand, Geoffrey’s hold on my mind dropped as well, so that I was entirely my own mistress again. I turned at once to snatch up my dagger but he was there before me, palming it triumphantly and turning its point to rest at the seam of skin where my neck met my jaw.

I swallowed with exquisite care, painfully aware of the thing’s stiletto-sharpness in a way that clutching its handle cannot hope to properly illustrate.

“So you are a blackguard and a coward both,” I said, forming my words with exceptional slowness, given the proximity of my neck to the dagger’s point. “But are you a dotard also? Do not forget I have taken steps to secure my person against such threats, and was even kind enough to name them before you made this vain sally against me.”

“You speak of your brother,” Geoffrey surmised. “He who lies in wait beyond the door. Is it so?”

I could hardly risk nodding my head, but conveyed with tightened lips that he was correct.

“You fancy he will contrive to stage a rescue, is that it?”

“He has worked against greater men for lesser cause than this,” I said coolly. Geoffrey brushed aside the dig to his pride with relative ease.

“What, you imagine he will move against me with his sister at knifepoint? I am perhaps ill-versed in the conventional affections borne for a sibling,” this said with a supercilious sneer aimed in his own brother’s direction, “but I am confident enough in my understanding of all men of quality that they pretend to some style of honour. Would he stand by and see you harmed? I think not. Let him enter if he dares, and I will make my case to him in such terms that I think would try the fraternal affections of even the most disinterested of men.”

And here he bore down with dreadful force on the knife, so that I was compelled to make a small cry, wholly involuntary, entirely alarmed, for I did believe in that moment he imagined himself drawing blood and meant to suit action to the thought.

My cry stirred the other company present in a way that the mere sight of a dagger at my neck had not.

“Geoffrey—” Lord Rodney sounded timid and fearful, but I could detect in his tone a desire to mount a protest all the same. I seized on this opening with all speed.

“Lord Rodney,” I said levelly, “yours is the title of Lord Whimbrel; yours is the seat in the House of Lords; yours is the authority. In the memory of your father, as worthy a statesman as I trust you desire one day to be, I implore you—”

“Silence!” Geoffrey rapped out. “No more authority has he than that I permit it. He yielded his portion of his natural gift to me when we were young. I command both, and we are the better for it.”

This, I understood at once, explained why I could perceive no evidence of a gift when I looked upon Lord Rodney. He had ceded all, by who knew what trickery, to his younger brother. Lord Geoffrey exerted the will of two men upon those he hoped to command, and I could feel the force of that power rebuilding itself even now.

In an attempt to gainstay him, I reached out with my own gift: namely, the portion thereof that I have trained in the use of seeking objects.

I do not know that my brother Sherlock would be pleased to find himself so categorised, but for my purposes in that moment it suited me quite urgently that he should be thus known. According to the custom of my training, I focused with great urgency on the object of my desire, and compelled it to bring itself forth to me.

How I was to warn my brother that our quarry had armed himself with no greater weapon than my own person to use against him, I could not yet work out. That I was not nearly so confident as Geoffrey of my fitness to serve in that capacity I could scarcely admit even to myself. Trust my brother with my life I might, but trust him to succumb to the manner of blind, devoted panic that Geoffrey no doubt envisioned, I could not. My brother is prone to many vagaries of temper and temperament, but abstract, unreasoning devotion has not manifested among those qualities which I have to date enumerated in him. I was as likely to face a demoralising lecture for so risking myself as to be captured in this manner as I was likely to face the shattered, surrendered creature Geoffrey intended that he should be.

Indeed, I was rather more prepared to expect the former than I ever imagined I might see the latter.

But here, you see, the temperament of my late-trained gift brought itself to bear on the situation in a way I could not have thought to predict. It is the way, I am told, of late-trained magics that they act more powerfully at the bidding of the worker’s emotion rather than her intellectual intent, and so in moments of great passion—anger, for example, or grief or, yes, fear—it is more likely to be the instinctive, rather than express, will of the worker that is done.

And so it was on that night for me.

I had dreamed of her but one night before, and three nights prior to that as well. I had thought of her in great and particular detail while waiting in the entryway, and even driven my hand onto the letter with the full force of my memory of her behind it. So there was already passion worked into my thoughts of her, and when I called forth the object of my desire, there was more truth in the working that resulted than in the one I had first intended, so small wonder that she appeared before us all, shimmering in ethereal blue spirit-cast, the very same problem that had beset her from an early girlhood when fashionable convention had so driven her inside herself that it caused a fissure down the planes of her very soul, and created in her a most abominable and bewitching talent for astral projection, the better to mirror the division she bore within.

Lady Cecily Alistair, in the . . .

Well.

I will own that my heart leapt at the sight of her. She was quite clearly depicted in her ephemeral form, almost not translucent in any way, so that the daintiness of her features stood out charmingly in perfect, airy render, and the fearful expression which reworked her features in an instant at the sight of me held in abeyance by Geoffrey’s blade did dramatic and unaccountable things to my pulse.

Before I could even speak her name she vanished, and in the next moment Geoffrey whirled, seeking the source of the icy spirit-draught which had blasted across the room.

“What was that?” he cried, and I pleaded silently with Lord Rodney to reserve his witness: to communicate nothing to his brother of what in truth had hovered in the air at his back in answer to my own clumsily misfired summons.

“It—” Lord Rodney faltered, then came splendidly up to scratch. “Why, a draught, surely?”

“I know it was a—” Geoffrey checked himself with clear impatience, then turned back to face me with renewed ire. “Bah. Enough of these theatrics. Call for Billings, Rodney, and have him fetch us means enough to secure this meddlesome baggage. We will settle with her and the landlady both tonight. I have indulged your missishness long enough.”

If I had hoped to find in Lord Rodney a more valiant champion, I here met with disappointment. He went to the door and issued quiet instruction in tones so demure, I think they would have pleased even my more exacting brother Mycroft had he heard the same issuing forth from his younger sister.

An interlude passed, which I weathered in increasing discomfort, for I was unable to relax myself in any meaningful way with my person so menaced by my own blade. It was only when a secondary commotion sounded at the door and Geoffrey’s attention was captured by this that I dared stretch my arms out, forcing myself to endure the dreadful tingling and prickle along the length of them that spoke of sensation half-deadened by my fearful stillness.

“What’s all that about?” Geoffrey called. “Rodney, go and see.”

Rodney went at once, obedient to the will of his elder brother, and communicated with the person beyond the door.

“Geoffrey!” he called. “Geoffrey, come at once.”

Geoffrey did not obey, but he did direct, for one perfect moment, the entirety of his attention toward the door. It was this opening which I seized upon, leaping backward from the dagger’s belated thrust and scrambling to put as large a piece of furniture as the room could offer between us.

Had Lord Rodney remained his brother’s puppet in this moment all would have been lost, but the memory of my poor lady, the spectral captive of Alexander Finch who had worked foully poisonous magic on her mind and will, already warped and split beyond all semblance of function, was fresh upon me. I recalled by what mundane artifice I had recaptured my lady’s clarity of thought, and the means I had fetched with me this evening to effect a similar working on the will and wit of Lord Rodney.

The silhouette portrait of his father I drew and brandished, as powerful a weapon as any dagger. His honoured memory I invoked, even while his Lordship stood caught in his brother’s thrall. And Sir Rodney’s own birthright I recalled him to, with the urgency of my gift for recovering that which is lost, bringing his stolen will back to his mortal form and his wits to the state that they were always meant to be.

Such as it was.

The tide turned rapidly on my sometime captor in that moment. Shrieking his foulest threats and curses, he was borne away by the butler and footmen to temporary incarceration, and at my plea I was in turn borne away to the comfortable prison of my landlady, who fell upon my neck with a discomfiting gratitude.

I first attempted to communicate under cover of these reunion raptures my discreet promise that I should soon be able to take her home. However, given Mrs. Tupper’s profound deafness my discreet vows were soon, of necessity, abandoned for much louder ones, until I am confident the entire street soon knew she had been a luckless prisoner indeed, and that I had come to style myself her saviour. Yet at the end of this pantomime we were no forwarder than we had been at its commencement, and I was rather the worse for wear about the throat.

Ultimately, I contrived to lead her forward from her cell, as comfortable a tower room as ever I had beheld, and down the stairs toward the freedom I intended to promise.

I was confident she would work the truth of it out for herself soon enough.

~*~

Sir Rodney, his will recovered, soon proved a most tiresome and suspicious adversary-cum-ally. He struggled to understand the truth of my purpose, and when I produced at last the message he and his brother had been at such great and nefarious pains to retrieve, I perceived at once that he was prepared to make trouble.

Not, perhaps, the full extent of a dagger’s point of trouble, but the manner of trouble that can be made by a stodgy and unimaginative male, which I am in a perfect position to inform all sceptics is one of the more tiresome sorts of trouble a person can make. Unimaginative males cannot be got around with any of the tools I had that night at my disposal, and my patience with all such of my species had worn to a tissue-thinness. So I ordered his Lordship to order his carriage.

Lord Rodney sounded all too much as if he had thoroughly discovered he was indeed Lord Whimbrel; worse, he sounded peevishly wrought, as if he had expected something more to his masculine taste for his money. “You are going nowhere. Sit down and explain this nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense.” Although I should have known better, his temper caught me off guard, and my tone heightened to match his. “It has cost me a great deal of trouble, and—”

And Heaven only knows how things would have gone if it were not that, just then, a considerable crash resounded upstairs, and shouts, and the sound of feet pounding down the stairway, and a great deal of hubbub throughout the house as Geoffrey Whimbrel thundered into view, pursued by two footmen in buckle-shoes, stockings, knee-breeches, red jackets, and white powdered wigs.

It would make an interesting study, why decorative servants must dress like the upper classes of the prior century. Most impractical. One footman’s wig had been jolted askew and the other’s flew right off as they pelted after his younger lordship. At the foot of the stairs the butler, Billings, joined the pursuit, bellowing unnecessarily, “He’s broken out, my Lord!”

Already Lord Rodney had jumped up and darted towards the large, museum-like entryway through which his younger brother was running for the door. I also leapt up to go see, and Mrs. Tupper, at her best hunchbacked speed, did likewise. Indeed, shrieks and yells both feminine and masculine sounded from the direction of the kitchen and other nether regions as the entire household came running to observe the fracas. Seemingly out of nowhere a crowd assembled.

The two footmen, the butler, and Lord Rodney attached themselves to Geoffrey like bulldogs to a bear, but even their combined strength failed to halt his charge for the door. They clung to his coattails and clawed at his shoulders as he lifted the latches and turned the bolts, flinging the door open—

Clearly visible in the firelight of the flambeaux, on the marble apron just outside the door waited a remarkably tall, angular personage with a great deal of unkempt grey hair and beard.

I was perhaps the only one not totally astonished.

Except, apparently, Geoffrey. Enraged or desperate beyond such petty sentiments as surprise, he took no pause. Tearing free of the annoying people clinging to his back, he hurtled out the door as if to run right over the greybeard.

But he ran instead into what might as well have been a bolt of lightning. Most swiftly and unexpectedly the tall man slashed a chopping blow with his edgewise hand, one long leg extended—alas, I cannot fully describe the manoeuvres which I believe, from references in the writings of Dr. Watson, demonstrated the Eastern martial art of “jujitsu,” nor can I detail the single-handed combat that landed Geoffrey on his back with the greybeard atop him, nor could I take pleasure in my brother’s prowess or in the astonishment of the onlookers observing a thin old man knocking down a strong young aristocrat.

The means by and speed with which Geoffrey struggled free would have stymied and awed a far more educated crowd than we. The ferocity with which he cast about, perceiving his exit blocked, and lit upon me as his likeliest means of escape would, I assure you, have shaken a much stouter heart.

The look on my brother’s face when he beheld me seized, dragged about to face him, and menaced with a fist wrapped around my neck would have gratified a heart even as twisted as Geoffrey Whimbrel’s own. I, for one, stood no chance against the sight. I would in all likelihood have given way entirely on the spot, had I not been so aggressively kept on my toes by the villain who held me in his grip.

“I will choke the very life from her!” he warned, and gave me a hard shake so as to illustrate the point. “Stand aside now, sir, or see it done.”

I do not know what Sherlock intended to do in response to this ultimatum. I have not, to this day, dared to enquire. Much as I seek to protect his finer feeling from giving full voice to whatever he felt at beholding my entrance to that den of iniquity, I seek to protect my own from hearing him confess the deep and abiding weakness I saw in him at that moment.

He was entirely powerless in the face of the threat Geoffrey levied against him, and I was struck dumb at the sight.

It was as well for both of us that there was yet one party involved who had full command of her faculties, if not her flesh, and she brought them to bear on us all in that moment. A terrible frigid wind blew up all around us, and the spectral form of Cecily Alistair descended with shrieking, unspeakable fury as though drawn from the night sky above us all to wreak bloody vengeance on the whole household and all its inhabitants.

So completely cowed was Geoffrey by the sight, she might as well have attacked him with jujitsu.

He struck the floor at once and I reeled free, gasping, clutching my throat and lacking even the sense to push away the supportive hands of my own brother, whose capture of me it was my daily ambition to elude.

“Enola! You are not injured?” he asked, speaking and handling me with surprising tenderness, considering our predicament.

“Not perceptibly,” I decided, with a heavy rasp to my voice, but this did not reassure him to the degree I had expected. Instead he cast a fearsome look upon the shaking, felled form of Geoffrey Whimbrel.

“If I could work my will on that scoundrel—”

I regarded him with deep surprise.

“We haven’t the time!”

I was right, of course, and in more ways than he could understand, for I also had not the time to linger and permit his wits to overtake his emotion. The moment they did, I feared he would make me as much his captive as Geoffrey had done, with far more lasting consequences. 

I tarried, then, only long enough to look about and see that my lady was standing in her spectral form some distance from the fracas, watching with transparent care. Watching, I hasten to clarify, not the aggressive recapture of Geoffrey himself, nor even the ineffectual bluster of his elder brother.

No, Lady Cecily Alistair was watching _me_.

I smiled at her with unaccountable warmth, then waited only until my brother Sherlock was _not_ watching me to take hold of my landlady, retrieved at such cost, and make my escape into the night.

~*~

Due to the nature of my departure from the house, with my brother in it, the true conclusion to this adventure was not effected until some further months had passed and my brothers and I were at last no longer at odds. It was only then that I found myself free to finally call upon Lady Cecily as I had long dreamed but never dared to do: as her social equal, without the threat of my brothers’ pursuit to hinder any forays into . . . well. What I intended to pursue with regard to Lady Cecily I hardly knew myself, but I knew just enough to understand I never could while my brothers hunted me.

So when their hunt for me had ended, and we determined to go forward as a family, I set aside the first afternoon at my disposal to deliver my card and be received into her presence not as Miss Meshle or any of my other sobriquets, but as Enola Holmes, herself, alone, and in desperate need of a friend.

My lady received me as if we were friends already, and it was with almost unspeakable pleasure that I clasped her hand, so warm and real, and offered my most belated thanks for her assistance rendered on that night.

“Oh!” she said. “That. Please, Enola, I hope you will forgive me for the means by which I effected it. But I knew at once when you rescued me for the second time that I must provide myself with the means to return the favour, and this was the only means I could devise that I thought might suffice.”

She must have seen then by the expression on my face that I had no notion of her meaning.

“He did not tell you, then? Your brother?”

“My brother has spoken to me at great length on any number of subjects, but none of them occasioned the mention of your name.”

“He is discreet, then. But of course he must be, in his profession.” She hesitated then, and searched my face with care. I felt compelled to lift my chin, the better to facilitate her scrutiny. At this she relaxed, and smiled, and a warmth suffused my limbs as though they were all at once come to life again.

“My dear Enola. I hope you will forgive me, but on the day that you rescued me the second time from the threat of my marriage, I undertook to secure the chance to some day rescue _you_. You had twice been the saving grace of me, and it did not sit right with me that I might never provide the same service, should the need of it come to pass.

“And so I imposed upon the good will of your brother, and took advantage of his desire, aligned with mine, that no harm should befall you. We effected a simple enchantment, a reciprocity of contract. The service he rendered my mother in the retrieval of me was made a mirror image of, and the working secured that her blood might provide succour to his in turn, should the need arise. Her blood being mine, and his being . . . well.” She smiled on me with transparent fondness, and my face heated unaccountably. “So when you first summoned my spectre to that room and I beheld the peril you faced, I drew on the working to return to you. I effected first a commotion in the hallway, and then communicated the magnitude of the situation to your brother outside. Finally, I was able to appear in the entryway as you beheld me, and remain until the contract was fulfilled; that is to say, until you were free.”

“It’s as well Mycroft never needed you before I did,” I muttered, and wished I did not sound so viciously ungracious.

“It was a risk,” she agreed, my utterly incomparable lady, so poised and demure on the edge of her chaise as though she had not ever taken on her spectral form to fly to my aid in the dead of night and terrify an accursed scoundrel half out of his wits with no force greater than her own screaming fury. “And certainly we knew that there was a chance you might never need me. At the time it seemed almost certain you would not. What aid could you require that I could ever provide? Oh Enola, you are, in times of threat and torment, a most formidable adversary!”

How strange that she should use this phrase. I had on the very night of my rescue so named my brother Sherlock, and so he is known among certain disreputable classes. Yet he is a mortal man, and given sufficient means—both mental and monetary—even a mortal of towering intellect and associated mental acuity may be put off one's trail. My own protracted liberty was proof enough of the fact.

"My dear," I said, then ceased all speech, for of what profit were my words likely to be? They could effect no fit expression of gratitude, and as to socially gracious rejoinders, none who knew me would ever imagine it might be birthed by the efforts of my own tongue.

A young lady reared by a mother other than my own might have effected much effusive gratitude with the warmth and gentle tact of her speech, and thereby rendered my lady a measure of the due appropriate to her efforts. The child of my mother, alas, while undeniably furnished with a commendable education in the art of independent study and pursuit of understanding, had not been initiated into the sisterhood of socially gracious women. Indeed, my own mother had so christened me as to suggest I would spend the greater part of my days in solitude.

Enola, of course, inscribed in reverse is . . . you see?

And yet, with Lady Cecily inhabiting the chaise lounge across from my seat, I had never been more passionately awake to the knowledge of my desire to forsake my name—or at any rate, the meaning of my name that had been for some time the private assurance of my parent.

Very well I could do—did do—had long done—on my own. But more than I had ever desired to be alone, the sight of Lady Cecily awoke in me the desire to . . . what?

I could not even name the emotion she provoked me to. It was so far beyond my learning that it owned no title in my lexicon. I had made known to my brothers my intention to pursue higher education, and perhaps in those halls of learning, among the tomes of scholars longer devoted to their studies, I might eventually acquire the precise terminology which would permit an accurate description of what I felt—what sensation consumed me—when I beheld her.

In the meantime, bereft of words, overburdened with feeling, I leaned forward. What I would have done if she had not done the same, I do not know. What I would have done if she had not done the same, I need never know.

For as I leaned forward, so did she, and in the space that lay between us we met, and I there discovered in an instant that some expressions of gratitude may, if the spirit is willing, be effected without benefit of any speech at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide!
> 
> I have to thank you first of all for being the reason I even read the Enola Holmes series; your prompts for it caught my eye a few years ago, and I was so intrigued that I thought I had better pick it up when I had the time. This was the year I got around to it, and it was such a pleasure to be able to thank you for the unwitting rec by filling the prompt that first sparked my interest.
> 
> I will also say that your prompts provided so many tempting avenues I struggled to settle on just one! I do hope this alternate take on the Enola Holmes universe, the phenomenon of Cecily’s split personality, and the end of the Peculiar Pink Fan, Cryptic Crinoline and Gypsy Goodbye adventures are something a bit like you had in mind.


End file.
